Can't scan to a PC over network. Setup for direct e-mail is cumbersome and poorly explained.

Bottom Line

The Canon imageClass MF4690 offers some rarely seen and highly welcome features. But it fails to make them easy to set up.

Some products miss perfection by such a small margin that you have to wonder how the designers could come so close only to fumble on the details. The Canon imageClass MF4690 ($399 list) is such a product. It's good enough to be worth considering, but it lacks the final polish that could have made it a slam-dunk winner.

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The monochrome laser-based MF4690 is the right size for a personal AIO in a home or any size office. At 18.6 by 15.4 by 21.0 inches (HWD) and 31.6 pounds, it's small enough to fit comfortably on a desktop, and it includes a network connector so you can share it easily. It also offers excellent paper-handling for light-duty printing, with a 250-sheet input tray and a print duplexer. Rated at 21 pages per minute, it adds a 35-page automatic document feeder (ADF) to its flatbed scanner to handle multipage documents, which makes it even better for office needs.

In addition to printing and faxing from a PC, even over a network, the MF4690 works as a standalone copier, fax machine, and e-mail sender. It scans to PCs only over a USB connection, but it also lets you scan to a USB key, so you can then move the USB key to your computer to copy the file or files to your computer's hard drive.

Both scanning to a USB key and sending e-mail directlywithout using an e-mail program on your PCare relatively rare features. Either by itself would make the MF4690 stand out. Together, they make it potentially quite attractive. And I haven't even mentioned fax forwarding, which lets you set the MF4690 to forward incoming faxes automatically to an e-mail address as either PDF or TIFF attachments.

Unfortunately, as handy as these features are, Canon drops the ball on implementation. To begin with, scanning to a USB key only partly makes up for the lack of ability to scan directly to a PC on a network. It's a welcome convenience, but in many cases, scanning to a PC would be even more convenient.

Worse, although basic setup is easyinstall the toner cartridge, plug the cables in, and run the automated installation softwarethe e-mail and fax-forwarding features are cumbersome to set up and badly explained in the manual. To set up the e-mail feature, for example, you have to use the AIO front panel's phone-like keypad to enter things such as your e-mail server and password, which is a tedious process. In contrast, the somewhat-more-expensive Dell MFP Laser Printer 1815dn which also offers direct e-mail and fax forwardinglets you enter this information from your keyboard by way of a browser, using a Web page built into the AIO.

The MF4690 has built-in Web pages, too. You can use them to enter a list of e-mail addresses and then send e-mail by choosing from the list through the LCD-based menus. But you can't use the Web pages to set up the e-mail feature itself. And it doesn't help that the first Web page you see for the AIO asks for a password, with no information in the manual about the password's default setting or how to get past that screen. (As it turns out, the default is leaving the password field blank, but there's no way to know that.)

What all this adds up to is that although the MF4690 gets extra points for these nifty extra features, it loses almost as many because most of them are so hard to set up that you may never use them.

That said, even without these extras, the MF4690 is a more than reasonable choice. I clocked it on our business applications suite (timed with QualityLogic's hardware and software; www.qualitylogic.com) at a total of 7 minutes 56 seconds. That makes it the fastest monochrome-laser-based AIO I've seen in its price class. To get significantly faster speed, you'd have to move up to a more expensive model, such as the Editors' Choice Brother MFC-8860DN.

The MF4690's output quality is pretty much what I'd expect from a monochrome laser. More than half the fonts on our text test were easily readable, with well-formed characters at five points, some passing that threshold at four points, and only one heavily stylized font with thick strokes needing 10 points. Unless you have a highly unusual need for tiny fonts, the MF4690 will handle any text you want to print.

As with most monochrome lasers, graphics are good enough for internal business use, but not good enough to hand out to an important client you're trying to impress with your professionalism. Among other issues, thin lines tend to disappeara common problem for printersand various shades of gray show dithering in the form of visible patterns. Photos are good enough for printing things such as client newsletters and Web pages with photos, which is about as much as you can expect from a monochrome laser.

One other negative for the MF4690 is that it comes with a starter toner cartridge that Canon rates at only 1,000 pages, based on the 5 percent coverage of a typical text page. (The replacement cartridges are rated at 2,000 pages.) That yield was low enough to give me low-toner warnings long before I finished our standard testswhich is almost unheard of for a laser printer.

The real problem, however, is that once the low-toner warning starts, the LCD repeatedly cycles between it and whatever should be on the LCD, making it hard to use the menus to send a fax or e-mail, for example. In my tests it took another 190 pages before the cartridge actually ran out. Depending on how many pages you print per day, this could translate to days or weeks of the low-toner warning interfering with the LCD menus.

On the balance, the MF4690 offers enough speed, output quality, and features to make it well worth considering for personal use or in a two- or three-person officeespecially if you're willing to struggle with the rough edges to take advantage of the e-mail and fax forwarding features. But it also leaves me hoping that the next model will be the polished version that the MF4690 should have been.

About the Author

M. David Stone is an award-winning freelance writer and computer industry consultant. Although a confirmed generalist, with writing credits on subjects as varied as ape language experiments, politics, quantum physics, and an overview of a top company in the gaming industry. David is also an expert in imaging technologies (including printers, moni... See Full Bio

Canon imageClass MF4690

Canon imageClass MF4690

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